League of Legends

[Kaden]

Someone posted these on the LoL forums:

WCG Finals Round 1

WCG Finals Round 2

WCG Finals Round 3

I'll spoiler tag most of this, but in game 3 there is the single best Amumu ult I've ever seen: hawkshot from Ashe, bandage toss through a wall, and ults the entire enemy team. "Holy shit" describes it perfectly. Also, Game 1 was fantastic.

[spoiler]So it was pretty easy to see how the two teams used playstyles that were basically the exact opposite of each other. US with the steamrolling-katamari-of-awesomeness that is the five-man gank squad and Germany with the hyper mobile method of multi-lane pushing. Germany absolutely destroyed in the first game with a TF that was just all over the place. US had no answer for him.

At the beginning of the Game 1 video, Phreak talks about how Germany was prepared for the Taric, Garen, Morgana, Amumu, whoever (MF?) team that US started with. If I saw that team in a ranked match I would probably just afk and call it good. Using that TF/Shen/Soraka combo of globalness was a good counter, but it really seemed like they didn't think it all the way through. If the strategy didn't work, then it didn't work, but if it did work, then of course US is going to counter ban. And that's exactly what happened.

Without their TF, they went to more standard poke/kite team comps, but that was the absolute worst thing they could have done. The current "lawl we're tanky DPS" US meta spawned because poke/kite teams can't do shit about it. You can poke all you want, but when the other team just balls up and rolls down your middle lane, there's not really shit you can do about it.

I think Germany continued picking champions that suited their playstyle, but once the game got started, they let themselves be pulled into the pace of the US game. Still, a couple of phenomenal games. The third one not-so-much, but... y'know... it happens.[/spoiler]